The pick distribution showed 97.6 percent thought Duke's Blue Devils would shut down the Mercer Bears. But even after a single game on the NCAA March Madness tournament's first day, almost 84 percent of participants were already knocked out when Dayton upset Ohio State.

That happened when the three remaining players with perfect brackets got wiped out after Memphis beat George Washington. This means it took just 25 games for everyone to be eliminated.

Results from ESPN’s Tournament Challenge after Thursday looked similarly dire. Over at ESPN, only 18,741 of 11.01 million people (or 0.17 percent) got all 16 games right on the tournament’s first day, ESPN’s Kevin Ota told ABC News.

But then, the finance guru probably worked that out before he backed the Quicken Loans’ challenge in January. As ABC News previously reported, the odds of guessing a perfect bracket were estimated by one mathematician to be 1 in 128 billion (and that’s if you know something about basketball). In the same YouTube video, DePaul University's Jeff Bergen explained that there were more than 9 quintillion ways to fill in a bracket.

If any one of the 16 left in the challenge was able to correctly pick every single winner in the tournament, $1 billion could have been all theirs, doled out in 40 annual installments of $25 million, or a single lump-sum payment of $500 million.

The only other heartening news is that 20 people will be eligible to receive Quicken Loans' $100,000 runner-up prizes for picking the tournament's top 20 most accurate "imperfect brackets."